Oh, one more, just one more before we go to the infamous Metric System!
What are we reading now? Yeah, text. But how is it written? It is English using the Latin alphabet (more on that later), but the point I am making is this .
That space between the . and the ‘this’ is not by chance, it is punctuation, which has grown to be another quasi-universal standard, a bit earlier than mathematical and music notation.
Punctuation, from Latin punctum (dot) — the dashes, squiggles, dots and spaces you are reading now — is so normalised that I barely noticed it until I started this project. Yet it is one of the “global standards” in writing beyond a specific alphabet, quite like algebraic signs are virtually universal among numerical systems beyond the Arabic numbers.
For most of human literary history, texts in many alphabets looked more like this: scripturacontinuawheretherewerenospacebreaksorparagraphs — a long, breathless string of letters rolling inexorably forward. And they still look like this if you are reading Javanese: ꦱꦧꦼꦤ꧀ꦮꦺꦴꦁ ꦏꦭꦲꦶꦂꦫꦏꦺꦏꦟ꧀ꦛꦶꦩꦂꦢꦶꦏꦭꦤ꧀ꦢꦂꦧꦺꦩꦂꦠꦧꦠ꧀ꦭꦤ꧀ꦲꦏ꧀ꦲꦏ꧀ꦏꦁ ꦥꦝ꧉. Here, the way the words themselves are written together, the ups and downs, does indicate a cadence in the reading.
Japanese kanji and Chinese ideograms are still traditionally written without spaces, as each sign, or pair of signs, represents a concept, but modern writing in these systems does tend to use spaces and punctuation, like , (comma) and 。(period).
In fact, the division of words into discrete units of text is kind of artificial, because spoken language does not work like that. It is hard to notice, but when we talk we kind of talk in a scriptio continua, or more aptly, talkacontinua.
Notice next time you talk: we do not add little pauses between words. In written terms: we. Do. Not. Speak. Like. This. And, honestly, that would be a bit of a waste of time.
Our brains have evolved to process around 10 phonemes per second, irrespective of how many words are in there. So we hear them all at once. The record of most phonemes pronounced and understood in one second stands at 23 (depending how one counts phonemes).
That is equivalent to this sentence.
Talked and understood.
In one second.
In Latin, writing without punctuation and spaces was known as scriptio continua. It was common in most ancient scripts, including hieroglyphs, cuneiform, Chinese ideograms, Tibetan, Sanskrit, and even the Maya glyphs — maybe with the exception of Old Uigur/Mongol scripts, which connect the phonemes of each word by a vertical twig-like line, thus separating words if the lines were not connected.
Thus, from the scriptio continua, writing in the pre-printing press world was not simply to store knowledge and pass it on as text. No, the purpose of writing was to assist the performance of the text — kind of like the prompter notes that theatre players use to help deliver the lines. Early texts were supports for the oral tradition, not replacements for it.
Text just travelled as a kind of parasite of the much more popular and extensive oral tradition. Literary text was mostly a device helping with memorisation, which was the core of the whole cultural transmission. And the oral performance was a skill to be kept, practised, valued, specialised and perfected.
The text on papyrus and tablets, in most of the cases, is the equivalent of prompters from the ancient world. Thus punctuation was neither necessary nor standard. Why mark pauses when the pauses already existed in the bodies and memories of the performers?
Reading was not a silent, private act; for most of human history, storytelling has been a performance, usually given by trained bards and poets.
Even today, many cultures which were until recently purely oral in nature, or still are, value immensely the individuals in their group who do keep these oral traditions alive. The more songs and stories you remember, the more appreciated you are and the higher status you have.
Moreover, there are many cases of individuals who, due to old age or life events, have lost sight. Some of these might specialise in oral storytelling and poetry, making them really valued members of their society, despite the difficulties that not having sight might otherwise entail.
The divisions in sentences, the pacing, the pauses — all of that lived in the voice, not on the page. The written text was a mnemonic scaffold, a reminder of what you had already memorised, or at least heard performed professionally. If you were not trained in the piece, staring at lines of continuous text was like, after an all-nighter, being put at a blackboard in front of a class to do complex arithmetic — the kind professor would kindly put you to sit and make you listen instead.
Night-bed reading, as much as many of us love it, is a rather rare and recent tradition.
Again, the classical Greek texts had some visual guidance that can be interpreted as early punctuation.
By the 3rd century BCE, reportedly, Aristophanes of Byzantium introduced a system of dots at different heights — low, middle, high — to represent different lengths of pause. It was not quite “.” “;” “:” yet. The Greeks also experimented with marginal marks, paragraph dividers, and diacritical hints.
Iberian, a different ancient script from the region I am from, Valencia, also has in most instances several dots as separation between words.
In my childhood, I observed these wiggly scripts, which many times seemed more out of the hand of a child than a neatly curated Latin text that we see all around us in print, or even in the old Latin scripts that will be nearby in a museum or exhibition.
In my child-mind, I considered the need for dots in these Iberian scripts to arise naturally due to the seemingly chaotic nature of the writing itself, in contrast to the well-arranged ones, that needed only a clear space. The letters in the above example (read right to left) are uneven. Many of the texts often needed horizontal lines to arrange them, the same way that we children were taught to write between straight lines at different levels. Thus, neat writing handled by experts and people familiar with recitation did not need the ‘wasteful’ separation of spaces, while writing by people (or children) where writing was practised more sparsely used punctuation more often, albeit not overly standardised. In the case of Iberian script itself, only a few thousand rather short texts survive, despite this cultural group extending over hundreds of well-studied settlements, and the script itself being in use for 400 to 600 years.
The later Runic scripts — which incidentally look similar to Iberian — are also short texts, often wiggly and fitted inside guidance lines. Also, only a few thousand runic texts still remain. These, like Iberian texts, commonly have ways of separating words and sentences, like dots, lines, crosses, or sections of a serpent!
Moreover, in Maya texts decorating ceramic vessels, we find one or two thick lines or two or more vertically arranged dots or circles, sometimes with small fiddling fillers added, indicating the end of sentences. These ceramic texts often were, we can say, more amateurish, less elegant and “space-conscious” than the palace walls or surviving codices — a bit like the wiggly Runic and Iberian scripts.
Another clear example of how text was just auxiliary to recitation is the vast genre of didactic poetry.
Humans are quite good at remembering songs and poetry, especially when held under a predictable metric and rhyme. Since in the past text was not ubiquitous as now, people had to memorise most of the important content they needed for technical and theoretical knowledge as rhythmic songs that they would recite. Potions, medications, how to plough a field, how to seduce someone, history, geography, the origin of the universe, atomism, to name a few — all these things were carefully adapted to poetic form once widely used so people could access the memories stored as songs and recitations at the tip of their tongue, when smartphones and Wikipedia were not an option. Or imagine how a pub quiz would be if people started reciting the names of rivers in rhymes to crack an extra few points remembering the fifth longest river of the state. Or the pharmacist recited some poetry to make sure that the medications you are taking are not incompatible with each other.
Interestingly, one of the most influential texts in history, the Qurʾān, contains much of this didactic format. It has a kind of scriptio continua, called rasm. Until 1924 CE, when the Azhar Qurʾān, or Cairo edition (1343 AH), was printed, most, if not all, texts of the Qurʾān were written in a kind of skeletal text containing mainly the consonant pronunciation of the words in the Arabic alphabet, and without the standardised punctuation nor things like ! ? and diacritics.
The Cairo edition now is the most widespread Qurʾānic version. By 1343 AH there were 14 different standardised ‘recitations’ of the Qurʾān, that is, how to read the scriptures orally. The differences are subtle, but a pause can be different, and we know that in punctuation a point or a comma might be critical, so more importantly, the differences are contextually equivalent. The rasm itself was quite homogeneous, though different versions also existed, and the Cairo one chose al-rasm al-ʿuṯmānī as the orthography of the Qurʾān, that version being the shortest one.
As we have seen for the case of musical notation, originally, much of the written text was used as a mnemonic device to help with public recitation, not to read by the bed.
The Qurʾān was mostly intended for that use, as a recitation. In fact the word Qurʾān means ‘he read’ or ‘recited’, clearly spelling the intention of the text to be recited and read aloud. The act of reading the Qurʾān in the original Arabic has been made into an art. Many of the verses and surahs, or sections, have quite a poetic reading to them, and when travelling in Muslim countries it is quite melodic to hear imams reciting parts of the Qurʾān, or the muezzin doing the call for prayer, adhan, in the original Arabic. These rich, art-like forms of oral recitation might explain the long time until it was accepted that the Qurʾān could be printed, because many Muslim clerics initially refused the verses to be ‘soiled’ by a typographic technique.
What the Qurʾān exemplifies beautifully is this long-lived tradition of textual to recited mapping, where text and oral tradition cohabit the same space for centuries, and even such an important text as the Qurʾān was only printed in an accessible reading way accepted by a Muslim authority by 1924 CE, or 1343 years after Hijri.
Beyond the Afro-Eurasia context, Mayas, again in ceramic paintings, also compressed text in such a way that was just the skeletal support of well-known recitatory formulas. These were so standardised and well known that not all elements had to be written. So, like in the “old world” textual traditions, knowledgeable readers simply knew missing parts by heart. In fact, in Maya scripts, the quotative chehen “so they say” basically is saying that the text was conventionally recited, not unlike the Qurʾān.
On the non-Arab, post-Latin European geographies, the discontinuation of many of the philosophical and academic schools existing in the western side of the Roman Empire quickly fell out of fashion due to a multimodal impact of shocks: wars, economic collapse, fragmentation of networks, migration, substitution of the political powers by the “barbarian” populations which generally valued less such cultural traditions, the famine after the volcanic winter of 536, the consequent Justinian pandemic from 541 to 548, and recursive waves. That continuous conflict, famine, and pestilence ruralised much of the urban centres in that side of the world.
Moreover, a kind of “cultural inquisition” by the hands of a more militant branch of Catholic bishops that dismantled institutions linked to ‘pagan’ knowledge, or not emerging from Christian faith, erased much of the previous recitatory practices and transmission of many of the non-Christian texts. This combination of effects made the common parallel co-transmission of scriptio continua and recitation much rarer, especially in the western, or Latin, part of the previous Roman Empire lands.
The inheriting kingdoms and lands, thus, had a much smaller and scattered pool of experts to pass on how to actually read texts. In this environment, people scarcely or never listened to recited texts beyond clerical ones. Thus, when accessing a bloctextofscripturacontinua could be a challenging task for non-initiates without the oral form.
With fewer professional reciters, fewer schools, and fewer trained scholars circulating texts, the ability to “just know” where the pauses and cadences in the scriptio continua were was becoming rarer and rarer. A bit like the Iberian texts, which were quite rare too. This is when Isidore of Seville (560–636 CE), born in Iberia around half a millennium after the Iberian script lost its use, strongly pushed for punctuation standardisation, which many adopted.
By the 7th century, scribes in Ireland were adding more systematic spacing, word division, and symbols to ease public reading. The so-called punctus elevatus, punctus interrogativus, and other medieval marks begin to appear.
The rise of punctuation might be more a story of necessity born from the fading of oral memory, not unlike the rise of emoticons is a necessity born from the need to communicate casual information textually while face-to-face, and even telephonic interaction is fading.
Among the medieval innovations was something resembling our modern question mark. Originally a kind of elevated squiggle or stylised semicolon, it served to mark an interrogative tone in Scripture, telling the reader: here, please raise your voice before the congregation in a questioning way.
Medieval scribal marks were not invented for grammar as we understand it today — they were needed to assist performance in a performance-scarce world. They guided breath, rhythm, emphasis, and tone to the uninitiated. It was a more sophisticated prompting which might need less rehearsal, or initially avoid the need to hear it being recited before performing it. In this way the text can more easily travel by itself, without the need to be accompanied by a person who knew how to properly recite it, not unlike the musical notation that we have seen.
Printing press, killer of recitation
Here is where we introduce the printing press. Not so much revolutionary because it allowed cheaper copies of text to travel further and reach more people, but because it did for punctuation what the metric system later did for measurement: standardisation. Once texts could be mass-produced at a speed far exceeding the capacity to mass-produce and spread reciters, writing needed to be self-sufficient. The recitative transmission could not keep up with the changes, and punctuation was needed to ease rapid access for naïve audiences of new texts.
Punctuation became a technology for comprehension. The Guenberg Bible, looks kinda the scripturacontinua, but does have different punctuation signs and rules. Punctuation will be standardised later. Early presses, like the Venetian Aldine, popularised many of the marks — the comma, semicolon, full stop — in recognisable modern forms. The Aldine press also popularised modern formats of books, in portable “paperback-like” sizes.
Silent reading expanded, literacy without reciters first became affordable, accessible, and then widespread. In the process punctuation became a more standardised system across Europe.
Meanwhile, Arabic used spacing, diacritics, and occasional marks, but not the panoply of Western punctuation.
Outside Europe, South Asian scripts like Devanagari developed marks like the danda (।), but did not have Western equivalents until modernity.
With global printing, colonial administration, missionary presses, and later digital technology, many systems adopted Western punctuation by the 19th–20th centuries: the full stop, comma, question mark, and brackets appear regularly in Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, and Hindi texts today, even alongside entirely different scripts.
So Western punctuation is now nearly universal, though local variations and older indigenous traditions still coexist.
Interestingly, such standardisation emerged and consolidated at the same time as the mathematical and musical one, from XV to XIXc, also the same period of Western domination that we have covered.
Beyond the imperial apparatus, what these standardisations and universalisation show is the need and desire for ways to capture as accurately as possible form and meaning by increasing affordability of the form. These forms (music, accounting/science, recitation) where more accessible and circulated faster by reducing the need to have face to face interaction and transmission of knowledge and information.
While person to person interaction might produce, at first, more nuanced transmission, once the distances to travel, and the ease to copy, made other formats much more abundant than training and shipping living beings, then these dominated, and where even adopted in most of cultures of the world in one way or another.
Once you have trained people on the same codes at different parts of the planet, you do not need to send more trainees, just mroe coding to be processed. Sending a computer code is easier and cheaper than sending the whole computer over, even if you are more warranted that the code will work more accurately in the original computer, or a close reproduction of it. Paper is cheaper than people, if you have people on the other end to read the same signs, send the printed thing, not the person.
The Emoji Epiloge
And just as mass literacy once strained writing’s ability to convey tone, modern digital short-form writing strains it again. Text messages, tweets, and emails lack intonation, facial expression, and gesture — the very things punctuation once tried to restore.
So, almost inevitably, a new form of punctuation emerged: emoticons and emoji.
They compress emotion, tone, irony, and doubt into tiny digital glyphs — modern versions of breath marks, pauses, or rhetorical flourishes. In a way, they represent a second separation of textual and oral traditions: the written is now so independent of the spoken that we need new symbols to compensate for the loss of nuance.
Interestingly, emojis come out of combinations of signs that were not intended as emotional significance, but as grammatical expressions, such as the :), being just a left parenthesis and two dots.
Piggybacking in the interconnected world, many of these emojis emerged across the world, notably Japan, but are standardised as modern glyphs in the US.
Nevertheless, in a short time, emojis have emerged as a new global standard that permeates all the world.
🤔
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